127 Introducing the Book of Fire: An Online Resource Hub for Fire Engineers

We all had to catch up because Fire Science is just such a vast place to be in and this learning is kind of inherent to being FireSafe engineer . I've started the podcast introducing my mission to learn a lot from the world's best Fire Scientists and Engineers and share this learning process with you .

At some point I've switched my mission statement into more like bringing Fire Science to engineers who may not even know what it is and where to find it , which I think better explains what I am practically trying to do . But learning and improving my skills as a Fire Engineer is an important part of this mission .

A few weeks ago I was reflecting on this mission and how I am accomplishing the learning part , and I figured out that there's a group of people in the industry , namely the younger Fire Engineers or people who just enter the Fire Safety Engineering , who may not be benefiting that much from the podcast because perhaps they don't have the basin that's required to

digest everything being said in here . Perhaps there is simply too much . Perhaps they are looking for some specific knowledge . And the podcast episodes you know , for me they come at a very organized manner , but for you they may seem a little bit random in choice of topics .

So I figured out it would be nice to create something for the group of engineers who just enter the profession . And after a lot of thinking I figured out it cannot be just a podcast episode . It has to be something bigger . So here I am revealing to you my next big project , maybe not as big as podcast , but bigger than your ordinary project .

I call it the Book of Fire , and it's gonna be awesome . It's gonna be a resource hub with a ton of learning material and links to all great places over the net that you can learn from .

So you Fire Engineer , whether you are someone who's just entering the discipline or someone who has already established themselves in the Fire Safety Engineering , you can quickly find resources that are helping you to improve and do your job better .

And why I'm doing it , what's it gonna be and how it will look like and perhaps how you can help me building it better . Well , I'll tell you that after the intro , so I hope you stay with me for that and if you're not interested , just let me give you three key informations about the resource .

First of all , it's gonna be free , it's gonna be available in beta at the end of November and it's gonna be awesome . Let's go . Welcome to the Firescience Show . My name is Wojcicki Węciński and I will be your host .

This podcast is brought to you in collaboration with OFR Consultants , a multi-award winning independent consultancy dedicated to addressing fire safety challenges . Ofr is the UK's leading fire risk consultancy .

Its globally established team has developed a reputation for preeminent fire engineering expertise , with colleagues working across the world to help protect people , property and environment . Ofr is calling all graduates , as it is opening the Graduate Application Scheme for another year , inviting prospective colleagues to join their team from September 2024 .

If you take this opportunity , you'll be provided with fantastical practical immersion into fire engineering and a unique opportunity to work with leading technical experts in the field , while learning the skills critical to becoming a trusted consultant to clients . Then these offers just for you .

If you would like to check out this opportunity , please visit OFRconsultantscom for fertile details and instructions on how to apply . Okay , let's go . So first let me try and introduce you why I'm building a new resource app and why podcast is not enough for this particular goal , so it actually was meant to be a podcast episode .

I've posted a link in some time ago . Give me your best resources for newcomers into profession so I can make a podcast episode for new fire engineers that come in , and I was flooded . Thank you very much for that .

But I was flooded with great resources , great thoughts , a lot of confusion , actually a lot of opposing thoughts on what fire safety engineer is and what they need to succeed .

After that I've refreshed episode 24 with Jimmy Johnson on who is the fire engineer , to give me some ideas on what fire engineers could be looking for , and I've realized the podcast episode is not gonna be that helpful to everyone .

I mean I could drop and list 10 books and 10 journals and maybe 10 online resources in one podcast episode , shooting like a machine gun with links , but it's not gonna be very helpful to anyone listening . So I figured out okay , podcast is not the way . How could we do it better ?

It's a lot of blogs , really great websites , that have this type of information that I want to create and , of course , there's gonna be a segment of the book of fire about those pages . Those pages give you links to everything , but they don't give you a context . They simply provide you information but they don't walk you through the information .

So I thought it's important to not just give links , repositories , but at least take the person on a journey and tell them where you can find stuff and what you can expect from those pages . So in the end , I figured out this repository looks very much like an online course , and I've done a lot of online courses as a participant . I know how it works .

I thought this is a framework , a skeleton that could be used to host such a resource hub , and that's what I've chosen to build . So the book of fire is gonna be some sort of an online course . The objective is not really to just go from module one to end of the module three and be done with it .

The objective is to have something you can revisit and easily find information in . But I think the framework of an online course will give the best flexibility for me as a creator , so I can update the modules whenever I like . I can grow them .

It's gonna give a great flexibility for you as the consumer , because you will be able to jump from module to module and just to relisten to one unit and just have everything at your hand in a structured format .

And one more benefit of an online course because I will build it on a software platform called Circle is that it's community-based courses , so there will be a community aspect in it . You will be able to communicate with other ones who are using this , and perhaps it will become a living organism where people will be sharing new resources as they come .

It will help me maintain the thing fresh so it always has the newest , best information . When I was contemplating to build this , I reflected on my own career as a fire safety engineer . So , okay , let's go . Let me give you the story .

I did the main school fire service in Warsaw , which is kind of a firefighting officer school with civilian component where we train fire safety engineers , and that's the course I did . There was a lot of firefighting stuff .

It was a lot of active fire protection , quite a lot of passive fire protection , so those things I think were covered really , really , really well . There was good fire dynamics thermodynamic dynamics perhaps on the hot side , but I've enjoyed it a lot , and also this has triggered my career in smoke control and simulations and everything .

Risk engineering was good as well , but some of the things were all over the place . It was hard to like . Some things were quite deep , like the active fire protection , smoke alarms , sprinklers . Some stuff were not that deep .

So exiting the school looking for a job , I found a job at the Building Research Institute , itb , at a smoke control division . So smoke control was a thing that was almost not covered at all . It was very basic information given at the school .

So my first task when I joined the new company was to bring myself up to a standard , to do some real engineering on smoke control . And this was the first time when I really had to dig through resources to obtain the missing knowledge .

I needed to know how this thing works and my colleagues from the office , of course they were very helpful in bringing me up on the stuff that I needed . But there was a significant component of self-learning . It was even harder because it was not just self-learning , it was also self-finding and the resources that could be useful .

It's possible that you learn smoke control , fds and stuff like that on your own . It's just a lot harder when you don't know where to start .

And then once I've , let's say , mastered the NFPA , 204s , 92s , fds and stuff like that , then I've learned that I am missing a huge chunk of knowledge required to effectively do projects on buildings , because I had no idea how the business operations side works on the buildings that I was working for .

You know , there's a big difference if you're designing a shopping mall or a residential building , not just from how the architecture looks , but what the people expect from those buildings , what they want them to achieve , because that drives so many decisions in the design process and the end use of the building that you have to be aware of .

I didn't know the technicalities of the systems we were working with . I mean , I knew that the smoke sensors detect smoke and they issue alarm , but how exactly this happens in the electronics of your building , what are the possible issues , what are the possible things that can go wrong with that and how that affects the performance of my smoke control system .

That is something I had to learn on the buildings and it was not very much covered in the school . I didn't understand . As a new engineer , I didn't understand the historical context of codes , laws , magical numbers and all this stuff like that .

So I only knew the newest version because that's what I was learning and I was jumping on the projects where someone told me oh no , no , because of a code in 2002 that existed , we had to do it like this and it remains like this and you just have to deal with that , so .

So that was a thing I need to find , and I didn't really understand why we are doing a lot of those things , many of those things . You know , if I read an FPA204 , I have an idea of how the system should work . What are the design goals ? And then I come to a project in Poland and then the design goals are quite different and I don't understand why .

Like what would we do it like that ? Why are we are not doing it that the other way ? And Doing the podcast really made me realize that all over the world , you will have the same problems every . Every time you do a project in a different context , you'll have to have a different set of knowledge .

Actually , in episode 24 , with Jimmie Johnson , I've defined fire safety engineering as being able to apply global knowledge and fire into your local problem , and that is something we all do in our fire practice . We need to find the global knowledge , because the local knowledge is not always existing and this global knowledge has to be turned into a Local context .

So you have to know what's happening globally . You know , you have to know what resources , what's the knowledge in the whole fire science and you need to apply it to your local context . And finally , in all of this , I found it's really critical to understand what you actually don't know .

It makes your job so much easier if you have an overview of what's out there that you have perhaps not mastered yet , so you realize what you don't know and you can learn that that's that's very helpful . So my fire safety engineering journey was a lot of learning at the beginning a lot , and I didn't have a great resource hub for that .

So that's one of the reasons why I'm trying to build a book of science today , so the future engineers have an easier start than I had . Also , at some point I've realized that stuff I don't know I have to find out on my own . And then I've realized that Finding important stuff on your own is something called fire science .

And that's why I became scientist , because actually , when you start investigating stuff that doesn't exist , you try to find things that are Not there in the code . You , you have to escape the bubble and Find new knowledge or create new knowledge .

If you cannot obtain a number , you have to do research , conduct research , and that's exactly what science is to me . So I also want to .

Given that I have an overview of being an engineer and a scientist , I also want to provide resources from all worlds together in one space so engineers have easy access to fire science , so fire scientists have some access to engineering resources in the same space . Because these things are so well connected , it's necessary to have them in one place .

I've also learned , being an engineer and a scientist over the years , that there are some very specific things I really need and there are things I don't really need that much . So we really need some numbers to work with .

You know design fires , fuel loads , fire characteristics , human movement speeds , pre evacuation distributions , how to , guidelines , step-by-step instructions on how to do stuff , frameworks and so on , so on .

There are those practical things that we really look for , and Today I know there are a ton of resources that can give you those answers Answers fairly quickly , and if you cannot find them there , there's a good chance you'll have to work them out on your own . So , again , another reason to bring all those databases .

You know online resource hubs , books with that and stuff like that Into one space . So even if you're a seasoned fire engineer , you appreciate being able to just go into one research space and then find the links to those . So as a scientist and engineer with the background in Poland , my , let's say , experience base is very limited to my own case study .

But for this project I'm teaming up with a Spanish company , jbva Gabriel Levine , jimmy Johnson who you know from the podcast very popular episodes they've made , and these guys worked for a big company in the UK , then moved to Spain to start their own company .

Gabriel is also an academic , jimmy is the president of SFP and he was leading the core competencies curriculum project , which you've learned from the previous podcast episodes about . So all together we cover a lot of backgrounds , a lot of national contexts at least European and a lot of career paths .

So I'll use Gabriel's and Jimmy's wisdom to make this resource hub more complete . And if you have your own origin story that you think it's important to share with others , or you have your own pathway into fire engineering , let me know because we can build on that and incorporate it into the book of fire . So now we know why I'm doing this .

Let's talk about for whom I am doing this .

Obviously , this resource base will be perfect place for any upcoming fire engineer , for anyone who just begins their professional education , for anyone who just switched their career paths into fire , for anyone who has just joined a consultancy company and have to start over In a field they perhaps are not an expert in yet .

So it's a perfect resource base for those who have to learn . This is the main target of the book of fire , but it's also going to be useful to anyone who's responsible for managing the newcomers .

So if in your company you have to train someone , if in your company you're responsible of teaching younger engineers , this will , be for sure , very helpful to you because it will have a lot of resources that you can just redirect people into and have the knowledge delivered to them .

So I really hope this will be useful not just for the newcomers but to many more senior engineers Also , because a big part of the course will be useful resources like links to the videos , databases , stuff like that .

I'm pretty sure that many of fire engineers , even if they don't need learning resources , they will revisit this part of the book of fire because I will simply make it convenient for you to find a lot of interesting stuff in there . So you know why . You know for whom . Let's try talk what it will be about and what you will find inside .

So to give you a fairly complete overview , it's going to be an online course . It will be called the book of fire and you'll be able to find it at thebookoffirecom Inside .

I'm blessed with talking to multiple interesting people from the realm of fire science in the podcast here , so they usually shower me with resources , so I am simply taking those resources and categorizing them , making a library of links and recording videos that highlight what you can find inside of them . That's how the whole thing will be structured .

So inside you will find three main modules , modules being bigger chunks of material that are further subdivided into individual lessons .

One will be on fire safety , engineer career pathways and core competencies , where I will use the example of SFP core competencies , by the way , discussed with Jimmy Johnson , episode 24 , I highly recommend listening to that episode because it gives you a ton of background to all of this .

So in this episode we will talk about what skills fire engineer has to have , how wide those skillsets are , where are they and what kind of competencies one should obtain . With this part , I hope to give an overview on what fire scientists or engineer could know , because it will make finding knowledge much easier .

We're also gonna talk about Future proofing fire safety engineering . So because I want this to be a resource valuable for young engineers that come to profession and Profession in 10 , 20 years will look nothing like it looks today , I think so I'll talk about how I'm future proofing my Work and what are the trends , emerging technologies and stuff .

It's really well investing your time . So that's module one . Module two that's perhaps gonna be the most used module resources for engineers and scientists , where we will go through the essential resources . I've identified essential books , the sources of credible fire knowledge , including peer reviewed Journals .

To be honest , as an engineer , I had no idea what the peer reviewed journal is and why being peer reviewed is so important to being a journal . Like seriously . I had no idea and now , as an academic , I know and I'm gonna tell all my engineering friends why it's important and where you can find them and how you can access them for free .

We are gonna discuss how to find those scientific resources and how to make sure the resources you're looking for are credible . We will go through all the commercial community projects that Give some sort of knowledge databases , resource basis blocks , podcasts and so on , so on .

I'll also try to list some of the main conferences , at least the ones that I'm attending . Perhaps this is the part of the book of fire that will be continuously growing because people will like to put their conferences in the agenda , but it's also important so people know where to find the knowledge . The module three will be on building skills and experiences .

So I really believe these are two different things knowledge or skills and the experience . Knowledge you can learn , experience you have to experience . That's my opinion and I'm gonna tell you all about how to get knowledge and how to build up experiences .

We are gonna discuss the professional associations that are in the realm of fire , some tools that are commonly used and how to start using them . We will discuss code speak and different systems you can find around the world that are related to the codes and standards .

We're gonna discuss some basic academic skills , you know , writing Literature , reviews and stuff like that , because I think as fire engineers we do that a lot and it's very helpful to know how it's done . So all of this three modules . On the battle lunch I will have module one and two ready .

I'm almost finished with them , so I'm very sure that these two modules will be ready . Module three will be in the making , so I think I will be just Uploading it as we go through the battle lunch .

It's gonna last for three to four weeks , so if there's a few dozen of people there with me who are participating in the course and giving me the Feedback on what works , what doesn't work , I can make it better on the fly . So the moment we launch it for real , it's it's gonna be the most perfect experience I could craft .

So now I've mentioned Battle Launch , so let me share the schedule how I would love it to happen . I think 27th November , that's my intended date for Battle Launching the whole thing . So on that day , the online environment of the course should go up Today .

If you go to thebookoffirecom , you will see a waiting page so you can sign up with your email and I'll send you links to log when the thing goes live .

So if you would like to be notified about when the whole project is starting , go to thebookoffirecom now , and if you're listening this after the launch , the Book of Fire is probably there , so I hope you are able to access and just sign in directly the full launch .

I am not sure what's your feedback gonna be and how much critical opinions there will be about the content , so I'm not sure how much work I will have to put to polish the thing , but I intend to launch it before Christmas . So I've set up a date for myself 20th December for the full launch . I hope this is something we can achieve .

I would really love to launch it this year . So that is my aim , that is my goal and I hope we can make it on that date . But it's not Casting Stone . So basically , if you tell me I have to rework it from scratch , I'm gonna hate you , but I'll do it because I really want it to be the best experience for everyone . Now , final statements .

If you want to make an impact on this project , if you want to help me with this project , there are a few things that you could do . You can sign up for the beta and participate there from the start of the Book of Fire . You can go through the videos , go through the links , tell me what works , tell me what doesn't work . Tell me how I can improve it .

Tell me it's all rubbish . Tell me . It's great . Every feedback is appreciated . So I would love to know if the thing I'm building is really working out , if you have a specific pathway that led you into the fire , if there are specific things that made you the fire engineer you are today . I don't know your experience , but I would love to .

So if you can share these experiences with me , I would appreciate it a lot because it will give a more complete image of what fire engineering is to the people who come into the profession . So that would , be for sure , highly beneficial .

Of course , the simplest thing if you know some resources that are not mentioned in the Book of Fire , but you believe they should be mentioned , just send them to me and I'll do my best to keep the thing updated and have all the newest links to the resources .

I'll , of course , have to first verify the resources , but I trust you , if you send me good things , the good things will find their way to the Book of Fire . So that would be it for this short announcement . I better go back to recording videos and building the course I will honestly share with you . I thought I'm going to build it in a week .

It was literally . I've posted a LinkedIn , I thought , okay , podcast is not going to work . I need to make a better resource than it was . Aha , I need to make an online course , because what I am thinking about looks like an online course . So let's go , let's do it . I've sat down , I've recorded some videos . They were rubbish . I've rescheduled everything .

I've written scripts for every module , every single lesson . I've started recording them . They were rubbish again , but a little less rubbish than before . So I've started improving . I've invested a little bit in the tech to make those more interesting than I have . This has happened .

Of course , I love doing this , but enjoying Japan and I versus was more important to me . So two week hold on the whole project .

Then I came back . We recorded . Now I think they are almost good to go . Some of them still need to be recorded , but it takes so much time and , yeah , time is not something I have in the surplus so , very naive voice that thought it's going to be an easy thing .

But I'm very happy in what's coming out of this and seeing the things I see today that you don't see yet , you'll see on 27 November . I know it's going to be great . Also , a big thanks to JVVA for supporting me in this .

Thanks to them , the thing will be provided to everyone for free , it will be maintained for years and also they've shared their experience and knowledge with me , which is priceless . So thanks Jimmy , thanks Gabriel , for supporting me in this project .

So that would be it for today , not such a short announcement , but really I'm really happy to share this with you and I really look forward to learn what you think about the resources I've built . So for the one final time , the book of fire .

At the book of firecom you can sign up for the waitlist and the first useful variant of that comes out 27 November . And now for the podcast for the next week .

On Wednesday we're going to have a little more chilled down episode again because I expect a large number of people coming into the show from outside of fire for another reason that you'll learn next week and I need to take the opportunity to share with a lot of general public what fire science is .

So there will be a more general episode on Wednesday , but I promise to deliver fire science to you next week as well . And I'm gonna post the second episode on Friday , which will be a normal fire science show episode with hardcore fire science for hardcore science enthusiasts . So exciting week ahead . A lot of work in front of me today and in upcoming days .

So , yeah , let's stay in touch . Thank you , bye .